


The Golden Age

by glasscaskets



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst and Humor, Artist Steve Rogers, Gen, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-04-18 15:17:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4710704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasscaskets/pseuds/glasscaskets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 1942, and Steve Rogers is a man of uninspiring size and even more uninspiring prospects. He's an orphan, he can't get a date, his best friend is overseas, and he's the only man his age he knows who isn't enlisting in the U.S. Army. Though not for lack of trying. </p><p>OR, an AU in which Steve Rogers stays lamentably skinny and his lungs stay useless, and as the war drags on, he creates an invincible character called Captain America, and sends his comics to his best friend, Bucky, who is stationed in Europe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic owes a huge debt to Michael Chabon's _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay_. 
> 
> "In 1938, Superman appeared. He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, by a couple of Jewish boys who had imbued him with the powers of a hundred men, of a distant world, and of the full measure of their bespectacled adolescent hopefulness and desperation."  
> -Michael Chabon, _The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay_

**April, 1942**

“Please. I bet the guy who didn’t want to recruit you was a German spy.” 

“A German spy? Working at the recruiting office?”

“It’s the perfect cover.” 

Gabe gave a shrug, and carried on walking up Lefferts Avenue, evidently determined to maintain the illusion that this was a reasonable conceit. Steve, flushing as he stretched his legs to catch up, was willing to bet his second rejection from the United States Armed Forces had a great deal more to do with his failing lungs and pitiful ninety-pound body weight that the machinations of a well placed German spy at a recruiting office in Flatbush. 

As Steve finally got his strides equal to Gabe’s, he considered what to do now. He was, insofar as he could discern, a portrait of woe more or less unmatched in the whole of Brooklyn, or possibly the state of New York. At five feet four inches, he was shorter than his mother, when she was alive, by a considerable amount, and as he was ninety-five pounds soaking wet, she had probably outweighed him. He was an orphan, had never had a girlfriend, and had a terrible squint that Bucky liked to say made him look like a mole, and the only glasses he’d ever own were smashed in a street fight three summers prior. His chest hurt more or less constantly, and it was frequently joined in its cacophony of aches and wheezes by his back cracking at odd moments, a precipitous stomach prone to revolting and roiling, a heartbeat that flailed and fluttered whenever he cared to make it out, and an almost total deafness in one ear that left him vulnerable to misunderstanding, alarm, and accidental rudeness alike. 

He had been rejected from no fewer than seven jobs on account of his inability to lift anything weighing more than thirty pounds for more than a moment or two; this rejection, on top of a pair of much more painful denials from the U.S. Army, when he attempted to enlist, and his downstairs neighbor Peggy, when he attempted to take her out for a movie, had left him permanently sore and on the verge of picking a fight since the New Year. That Bucky, very possibly the least pathetic aspect of his life hence far, had departed heroically for the European theater and had yet to write, only exacerbated the effect, while at the same time making his anger and energy feel all the more impotent. 

Gabe, at least, took consistent pity on him, though Steve lived in consistent fear that he was going to get fed up one of these days. Gabe was smarter than Steve, a revelation that had come swiftly and brutally many years ago when they got into a fight with big sticks from a downed tree and ended up becoming friends. Steve had never really talked to black people his own age before, but if Gabe was any indication, nothing he had ever heard about them from his sour-faced uncles was true. If he had the money, and the opportunity, Gabe would probably be earning his own weight in degrees and honors at a prestigious university right now; as it was, he worked for the subway in some nebulous and physically demanding capacity Steve could never nail down. In his downtime, he steadily worked his way through every library he could access; his goal, he told Steve, was to have read all of Brooklyn by 1950.

But for now, he was picking his way through filthy slush with Steve at his side, speculating freely about the potential utility of a German spy planted in an army recruitment center.

“He could send away anyone who posed, you know, too much of a threat,” Gabe said, neatly ignoring the fact that Steve, beside him, was red in the face from the effort of keeping up with him in the cold air. “What’d you say the doc’s name was again?”

“Eskine,” said Steve, trying to swallow his pants, “or, uh, Erskine. Ersine?”

“Sounds German to me.”

They had come at last to the building Gabe lived in with his father and sisters. Gabe stopped and hugged the book he was carrying to his chest, looking pink-faced, puffy Steve up and down once. 

“I’m sorry, though,” he said, “that they wouldn’t take you. Maybe in the summer when you’re less..” He trailed off, gesturing to Steve’s chest, or perhaps entire body, before smiling a little. Steve nodded. He knew Gabe was counting the weeks until he turned eighteen and could enlist himself. 

Steve and Gabe bid one another goodbye and Steve headed home. He would, of course, never admit it, but since Bucky’s departure he’d been punishingly lonely, and the long absence of a letter was beginning to weigh embarrassingly heavy on Steve’s heart. Bucky had, after all, written amply from basic training; was the silence now an indication of rejection, or tragedy? Both options were melodramatic but feasible; it had only been a few short months since, with deafening excitement and amidst many cries of _finally_ , America had entered the war, and already, the tirelessly patriotic radio programs’ reassurances notwithstanding, Steve had begun to hear word of grim letters and bad telegrams; his church had already played host to two bodiless funerals. As he made his way home, amongst the constellations of blue-starred windows, a handful of brassy gold embroidered stars shone reproachfully. 

Steve skipped his usual routine of smashing snow and mud off his boots when he stepped into his building and beelined, instead, for the mailboxes. Ignoring the insistent prickling at the back of his collar as his eyes slid over the name _Carter_ , he jimmied the lock on his own mailbox and smiled slightly as he saw that somebody had left the Dugan’s empty mailbox door hanging open. He bumped it shut with his elbow and inspected the contents of his mail. Three envelopes waited glumly for him; since his mother’s death, mail to the Rogers address had slowed to a trickle. It was almost always bills now, the odd battered envelope from Limerick bearing sparse news from his mother’s family.

Sure enough, the top two envelopes were bills, but the bottom was made of thin, yellowed paper, many times stamped and scrawled on, and without a proper post office stamp. His name—his, not _Sarah Rogers or current resident_ —was written on the front in familiar print. Steve’s heart leapt, fluttery, into his throat as his eyes found the return address, exactly the name he’d hoped it would be; partially obscured by a large sticker reading _BY AIR MAIL_ , but nonetheless clearly legible: _Capt. J.B. Barnes_.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Ain't got no news to write,  
> the censor says 'No!'  
> Seems a letter always comes  
> from you when I'm pretty low  
> So here's a little v-mail to you  
> It isn't very much  
> Just a line or so  
> to help us keep in touch!" 
> 
> -poem, accompanied by a small comic, from an American serviceman to someone at home, c. 1943

Bucky’s letter was like the arrival of springtime.

Steve had almost finished reading it by the time he made it up the four flights of stairs to his apartment, thoroughly out of breath, and he immediately began again. Bucky’s handwriting was the same as it had always been, neat and boxy, and Steve could _hear_ him, could recognize his voice in the two pages of Bible-page thin V-mail he’d been blessed with.

_Dear Steve,_ it began, and Steve’s heart was flooded. He’d read it through the first time so fast he didn’t remember any of it. He set the letter down on the bed and poked his head back out of the apartment, to the stairway, to make sure he hadn’t dropped even a shred of the envelope. He couldn’t lose any of this. 

_Dear Steve,_ he read again, and tried to make his breath settle down.

_How’s home? Is it still snowy? It’s MUDDY here, and I mean not puddle-boots weather, I mean it’s like there’s mud on everything and it sticks and it stinks. It’s like Mother Nature shat on everything. Don’t come here._

Steve set himself down, wheezing still (he really had to stop running up those stairs until the cold abated), onto the bed, setting the envelope on his chest and trying to achieve the kind of perfect sunlight and comfort a letter from Bucky deserved—though, did he deserve to be reading about the shit-mud from the comparative comfort of his mother’s creaking old brass bed? Likely not, he figured, but—

_Anyways mostly what we do is hurry up and wait, and run ourselves ragged, and put up with a lot of wasted time. But the boys still think New York is glamorous—there’s guys here from all over, guys from Arkansas and shit who’ve never seen a skyscraper. But I’ve never seen a farm, so I guess it’s not so strange. I wonder what they’ve been telling you we’re up to!! Yesterday night me and six other guys tried to see how far we could throw our shoes for almost an hour. All this to say I can’t wait till we ship out for real._

He could hardly believe it, but Bucky was rambling, even in the letter, and also chomping at the bit to see combat. It had been Bucky, only a few months ago, two mornings after every radio in New York City had squawked with fevered indignation that _the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii!_ , who’d told him he was crazy to want the same. They’d been sitting behind the tailor shop where Bucky was working, the same one that had lent him a sharp and proper suit for Steve’s mother’s funeral while Steve had shown up in his pitifully rumbled jacket (once Bucky’s, in fact) and church suit that needed ironing. It was lunchtime, and they were picking at Bucky’s sandwich and listening to the tailor’s radio squeak through the window.

“I’m not crazy,” Steve had said, “I’m serious, Buck. This shit’s been getting worse and worse over there, and now it’s our turn to step up to the plate.” 

“What shit? When’d you get to be such a patriot?” Bucky was watching the shop through the back window, making sure he wasn’t needed inside, and Steve knew he wasn’t taking a word he said seriously. He hated that. He wasn’t so much younger than Bucky, even if he looked it.

“I’m not a—I mean, I’m just saying, people are going to have to go fight,” Steve finished lamely, and left off that he’d already heard there was good money in the army, and that he didn’t have anything close to prospects in Flatbush (especially considering he had yet to work up the courage to admit to Bucky that he’d applied to the still-new Brooklyn College, for a fine arts degree not less), and that he had to do something before he caught pneumonia and died in the same bed both of his parents had. He also left off, though Bucky knew, that his neighbor Peggy’s family in London had been suffering tremendously for years now. He didn’t need Bucky ribbing him about Peggy anymore.

Bucky turned back to look at him. “Quit squinting,” he said, “and maybe they’ll let you in.” 

_Until then, it’s March here! march there! present arms! Where’s your cap?! and I guess more shoe-throwing. Hopefully nobody gets thrashed for it!!_

When they were little, Steve and Bucky used to try and bounce their shoes off the adjacent fire escapes of their respective buildings, before the Barneses saved up enough to move several blocks east, out of the clustered tenements, in 1938. By then, Bucky was already endeavoring to move out on his own—a goal never realized before the arrival of the war—and trying to tempt Steve to come with him. 

Once, Steve had thrown a shoe, cheaply made and on its last legs already, down with too much vigor and the heel had disconnected entirely, and despite his frantic attempts to hide it, his father—home, for once—had found it and used it to spank Steve’s ass raw. The next day, he and Bucky had sat opposite one another on their fire escapes and Bucky had presented Steve with a pair of his own careworn shoes, said Momma insisted, and beamed when he added that now he got to wear his church shoes every day. They never bounced shoes again, and it had taken Steve come years to come to appreciate what Bucky’s mother had done, and the memory was now oddly absurd, sudden and crowding his head all these years later. Bucky had remembered all the way across the sea. 

_Pretty soon we’ll_

The rest of this short line was coolly blocked by a censor, and Steve wondered what Bucky’d trusted him with. 

_I hope all’s well with you and that the cold doesn’t last and all that and that Mrs. Lagounov stops trying to up your rent and did you ever go back to see those twins we took to Battery Park? the maybe Chinese ones?_

The girls Bucky was referring to were neither twins nor Chinese, but he and Bucky weren’t brothers, half-Persian (where Bucky got this stuff, Steve could only imagine—dirty magazines, maybe), and they certainly were not on the verge of inheriting their father’s prosperous carper factory, and everybody knew that. Bucky’s elaborate constructed worlds were more fun when Steve didn’t poke any holes in them anyways—and besides, it was easier to get a date as Bucky’s kid brother and fellow heir to a Persian carpet fortune than as a ninety-pound asthmatic heir to nothing more than his father’s respiratory problems and his mother’s chronic worrying. 

_You had better have. Anyways I hope you found a better job than the factory and if you haven’t go back to the shop and beg for my job again—Mr. K loved me I’m not sure why he wouldn’t take you!! Threaten to set my mother on him. Speaking of which, kisses to Mom and Becky from me next time you see them._

_Anyways please send me some comics (Superman!) and I miss you—stop squinting—Buck_

Steve finished the letter and lay it down on top of the envelope, warm on his chest. In this exact bed, more than once, he’d weathered boiling fevers with Bucky’s hand level and heavy over his heart, a reassurance to the both of them, and always there when Steve surfaced from his drifting or settled after a spasm of coughs. He folded his own hands over the letter now. 

_and I miss you_

He wondered if that were true, or if Bucky threw it in at the end so Steve wouldn’t feel too bad about himself. How could Bucky miss him? He had new army friends, had plenty to do, had his first break from incessant coughing and always having to speak into Steve’s right ear in twenty years. He was probably causing every European girl—all of whom were thin and tough-looking with brown eyes and hair in Steve’s imagination—to all but wilt when he passed, probably enjoying having less pathetic people to count as friends. 

But, he said it. He made the reference to shoe-throwing and Steve’s rent and he wanted to get Steve on a date. It was just possible that, despite all evidence available in the flecked mirror that hung just over the headboard, Steve was someone worth missing even in the heart of the European theater, or at least to those waiting in the wings.

And so, he thought, he ought to buy some comic books.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "To be an artists at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus."  
> -Tom Stoppard, Travesties
> 
> Once again, I must note this fic's incredible debt to Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which is, I must say, a near-perfect book and especially so for Captain America fans.

 

The day after he got the letter, Steve sent Bucky all the _Superman_ comics he could afford in one go—which was only two—without a note, because he couldn’t think what to say, and saying the wrong thing to Bucky just now, anything that might reveal the depths to which his pathetic existence had sunk, was perilous. So he wrote a large _L_ and a smaller _onger etter ater_ , signed it with a flourishing _S_ , and stuffed the entire twine-wrapped package into the mailbox before he could think too hard about it.

Standing next to the mailbox, ankle-deep in filthy, slushy snow and feeling the unopened bills in his coat pocket, Steve did something he tried, as a rule, to avoid doing at all costs: he considered his prospects. 

There were no more recruiting offices he could easily get to, and anyways nobody was ever going to take him; Gabe’s fanciful German spies aside, he was no great asset to the United States Army. He wasn’t even allowed to go the blood drives they were holding at the high school he’d dropped out of years ago anymore, because after the first time he fainted dead away, and when he showed up again the stern-faced woman doing intake turned him away firmly. Which was too bad, because in addition to its obvious patriotic value, going to the blood drives meant a free, if tiny, meal. 

Work-wise, he was fucked. Right now, there was nothing; kicking a cold as he was he stood no chance of doing anything physical for more than a week without collapsing. Even factory work was going to kill him; when there was money to be made, Steve made it drawing and doing paste-ups for advertisements, by and large for the same dirt-cheap children’s magazine that existed primarily to sell ugly, easily broken novelty toys out of a smoggy, ugly one-story office in Alphabet City. He stopped in every week to ask if there was anything for him to do, and for three weeks straight now he’d been sent on his way; his pitiable bank account was stretched thin enough to recall the days when, just after his father died, he’d become so hungry he’d picked the binding glue out of a book at the library and ate it. 

For awhile, right around the time his mother died, Steve had worked at a movie theater, and he’d loved it, because Steve loved movies. He’d considered going back and asking for another job there, but the theater had changed hands since and he didn’t feel like making a case for why he was hirable; the old owner had known him from when he and Bucky used to spend the day seeing shows, and knew his mother had just passed as well, so Steve suspected he was a charity hire anyways. 

Besides working, all there was to do was dig out the old application to Brooklyn College, currently folded up very small and stuffed into his mother’s old Bible, on her ugly but once-ornate dresser that still held a silver-framed photo of her family back in Ireland, all grey and solemn-faced, grandparents Steve had never met, his mother as a child, her curls looking heavy and clumpy and her smile impish, four uncles and an aunt he never met either, all of whom watched him heavily as he rose each day and clambered, shivery, from pajamas into his dead father’s shirt and enlisted best friend’s suspenders. Nothing, it seemed, could merit their scorn more than to attempt a degree in _art_ as men died on the smattering of front lines Steve gleaned from the papers he stole from Dugan’s mailboxes every morning. Besides, Steve didn’t even have a completed ninth grade education to show for himself, and his ability to copy the image of an ugly novelty toy onto the page didn’t exactly make him an artist; he didn’t think Brooklyn College would want him anyways, and even if they did, there wasn’t the money for it.

A taxi whizzed by and splattered Steve’s pant legs with muddy water. He flicked the corners of the bills between his fingers and remembered working at the movie theater, sweeping up spilled popcorn and lugging reels of film to and from the projectionist’s booth, holding a movie for real in his own hands, ushering people to their seats and overhearing the same movie so many times they frayed apart in his head, became garbled nonsense messes until he sorted them out into something new, some other daring hero rescuing his warped beloved or some other musical about the Gay Nineties or some other dashing soldier suffering a series of crushing emotionally bewildering episodes with his best friend or girlfriend or family or all three. Steve dreamed up whole new plots out of the movie stew in his head; by the time he left, he’d written ten, twenty movies in his head, bizarre swirling recreations the movies he saw and heard so many times they played at the back of his skull constantly anyways.

Bucky used to say he should go to Hollywood. 

Bucky, who is _march here_ and _present arms_ ’ing, and shoe-throwing, in the European Theater, soon to exit and re-enter proper soldiers, going somewhere redacted in the letter, to be unfathomably real and at war, while Steve stayed in Flatbush, splattered with mud and panting from the cold and weighted down with unpaid bills and without anything to offer Bucky in the world.

Except maybe comics.

 

><><><

 

The train to his boss’s stale-aired office in Alphabet City was almost empty, and Steve watched the jittery advertisements reminding him that Loose Lips Sink Ships and that Tuberculosis Delays Victory. Steve, who had lived under the shadow of the fear of consumption for his entire life, didn’t feel he needed a subway advertisement to tell him as much, but he supposed the rosy-cheeked, square-jawed soldier frowning concernedly rocking with the train might not have ever given the matter much thought. Beneath him, by the door, a large black and white sign read only BUY WAR BONDS.

It was getting almost dark before Steve scurried up to the dusty offices out of which his boss, Mr. Phillips, operated somewhere between four and six cheap magazines ostensibly designated to sci-fi and children’s stories and really made to sell tobacco and toys from mail-order. Mr. Phillips was a broad man, with the air of a seasoned veteran of every trade he entered into, and had a face that reminded Steve inexorably of an oak tree. He ordered cigarettes by the carton and had two modes of speaking: snarling and shouting. Steve actually didn’t mind him much, because he paid him, and also frequently called him a wiseass, which Steve considered a compliment.

“I know it’s not Monday again,” is what Mr. Phillips said, when he saw Steve hovering damply in the doorway to his dimly lit office. 

“Uh. No, sir,” Steve said, because Mr. Phillips had an air that demanded being called sir even if he’d done nothing in particular to merit it, and also because Steve was very small and skinny and looked thirteen, so people tended to take extra offense on the entirely too frequent occasions when he failed to show them due deference. “It’s Thursday.” 

“Then what the hell,” grumbled Phillips, dropping his eyes back to whatever papers he was shuffling through. “I don’t have anything for you.” The only light in the room was a single hooded green lamp on his desk, and with the gathering dusk outside and the great billows of smoke engulfing Phillips’s face, Steve thought he might be about to lose his nerve. He squinted at the quivering spot of orange at the tip of Phillips’s ubiquitous cigarette and took as deep a breath as he dared without letting any wandering smoke coat his lungs.

“I’d like to draw you comics,” he said, in a rush, then added, “for the kid’s magazine, maybe, or, or, one of the science fiction ones. Like _Superman_ ,” he finished, lamely, when Phillips’s eyes finally pierced the smoke the zeroed in on Steve. 

He took the cigarette out of his mouth and stubbed it out in his overfull ashtray, then looked back down at his papers. “There’s already a Superman,” he said.

“Yes, well,” said Steve, “this one would be your Superman. He’d be called something different, and he’d, uh. He’d be patriotic. Sell war bonds and stuff. People love that.” 

Phillips lit another cigarette. “‘People love that’?” he repeated skeptically. “Rogers, can you even draw?” 

“Of course I can,” said Steve, a little wounded. “That’s what you pay me for.” 

“So, what, you’re just going to trace some super-man comics and stick them in _Adventures for Boys_?” he snorted, and he pronounced Superman like it was two words, not a name. Steve rolled his eyes.

“Comic books make good money!” he said, hoping that was true. “They’re not just for kids, even. The boys overseas eat ’em up.” 

Phillips looked up again. “That so?” 

“Sure,” said Steve, wildly, hoping Bucky wasn’t the lone _Superman_ fan in the European theater. “I, on my way here I mailed my friends in the service their big package of comic books. Paid a buck fifty for all of them, too.”

This was the kind of lie that separated Steve’s lies from Bucky’s; while Bucky spun tales so absorbing and absurd they hung in their air like clouds or cotton candy, Steve’s tended to be boxy and contained, edging the truth into something more workable, pushing the boundaries of what really happened outward just a bit. The forty cents he spent on comics could be a buck fifty if he’d bought more; the package to Bucky could be regular if Bucky wanted, and could be to as many of his friends as he wanted. Hell, maybe Bucky would pass the copies of _Superman_ along from bunk to bunk in the barracks like a treasured commodity; what mattered was that Phillips couldn’t prove he didn’t. 

“Buck-fifty,” Phillips repeated thoughtfully.

“Yes,” said Steve, taking an emboldened step into the room, his fingers beginning to fidget as he hit on an idea, “and those were just _Superman_ , and they’re aimed at the kids, but you could have, I mean I could draw you, these comics aimed right at the soldiers. Something a little more patriotic, something about them and the war and stuff.” 

Phillips looked at him, and Steve could tell he was thinking it over. 

“Somebody in the army,” he added, “like Superman, but in the army. For the servicemen. All their friends and moms and girlfriends will buy loads of them and send them over. It’ll be the thing to do.” 

Phillips sighed and blew a lot of smoke in the direction of Steve’s face. Steve, who was used to this exact intimidation tactic, stood his ground.

“I’ll think about it,” said Phillips. “If you bring me something. I can talk to somebody about it. What’s his name?” Steve blinked Stupidly. “Rogers. A name. You have a name? It can’t be super-man for soldiers.” 

“Uh. General. No. Um, Captain,” said Steve, wishing he’d thought his far ahead. “Uh.” _Patriotic!_ “America.” 

“General America?” 

“No, Captain. America, I mean,” Steve stammered, astonished to find Phillips fishing a pen from a mug on his desk and scrawling a note to himself on the corner of his paper. 

“Captain America?” 

“Yeah,” said Steve, “I can draw you a book by Monday.” 

 


End file.
